Studs Terkel was born Louis Terkel in New York City. When he was eight, his family moved to Chicago, a city of raw midwestern muscularity and deep jazz rhythms that sharply influenced his life and career. His love of acting and jazz combined with his urban working-class environment spawned his dual role as local radio personality and oral historian.

Though he graduated from college and law school at the University of Chicago, Terkel never practiced law. Instead, taking his nickname from a famous literary character of the day, Studs Lonigan, he succumbed to the lure of the stage, acting in radio and community theater productions and even in the exciting new medium of television. From 1949 until 1951, he had his own weekly show on NBC, Studs' Place, an innovative, improvisational situation comedy about "regular folks." Terkel took the show's loose, unscripted format from the jazz...